Does your local cable package include WGN from Chicago?

25 comments

1. *shrug* I haven’t had cable hooked up in at least a decade. I can stream WGN, apparently.

2. My cable package does not include WGN. This is a standard mid-range Xfinity package in central Pennsylvania.

3. My parents in Maryland get that channel, but I have zero idea why.

4. I dont know but there was an attempt to make it national all news channel and they were gong to be “unbiased” but there was a revolt because it was some right wing stuff going on.

   I think it’s just a cable channel based in Chicago -like some are based in LA or NYC.

5. Nope. I have cable still and never heard of it

6. Much like WNBC, WCBS, TBS, etc it was a local channel that was owned by a national company (in this case Tribune Media) and made a deal to go national in 1978. WGN ceased (national) broadcast in 2021.

   Edited to add: (national) for clarification

7. I had it back when I had cable

8. I remember getting WGN when I was growing up and thinking it was weird. I do not have cable or anything now, just over the air channels, so no idea if it’s available in my area.

9. The actual WGN that Chicago receives over the air hasn’t been on cable for quite some time. Years ago WGN spun off a “national” feed for cable and satellite that they eventually rebranded as WGN America. TBS was spun off from WTBS 17 in Atlanta in a very similar way.

   Now WGN America is a new channel called NewsNation.

10. I was just thinking about this. Beginning in 1978 WGN began being carried on cable channels across the country, just the local version. Like TBS, it was known as a “superstation.” In 2008, it was rebranded as WGN America, with completely different programming from the local WGN station. In 2021, the national service was rebranded as NewsNation. I’ve lived in the Midwest all my life, and even the most basic cable packages had some version of WGN. I guess that parts of the NE and west didn’t have this option.

11. I don’t know, but when I was a kid our cable in rural central Kentucky absolutely got WGN.

    I remember watching Bozo the Clown on WGN on Saturday mornings at my grandma’s house in the 80’s. . .from a place very, very far from Chicago in the hills of Kentucky.

12. Yes

13. Growing up in the 80s in Columbia, SC, it was one of the basic cable channels we got. No idea if we get it now.

14. No but it did in the 80’s

15. I never heard of it. Certainly never watched it.

16. When I was a kid in NYC in the early 80s we got WSBK from Boston and WTBS from Atlanta, but never had WGN. My grandparents in Boston got TBS and also WOR and WPIX from New York, but they didn’t have WGN either.

17. Not gonna lie, never even heard of WGN.

18. I remember watching WGN a lot in the early to mid-90s in Northern California as part of our basic cable package. They had a really good lineup, especially on weekday evenings.

19. Evansville here, yes we’ve always had this channel, way back to The Bozo Show.

20. It did when I was growing up in the 90s. I haven’t had cable for a couple of decades now, so I don’t know what’s in there anymore

21. I haven’t had cable in over a decade. I know that the cable package back then did have WGN America in it, though. For a while, it was even available over the air in our area.

22. relatives in western WI had it since the 80s

23. I get WGN in my Shaw (Canada) cable package.

24. Because the cubs are awesome!

25. So WGN is/was a “superstation.” Believe it or not, it had a specific definition by the FCC: Basically a broadcast station that had its signal also, either actively or passively, transmitted via satellite. (That’s compared to, say a cable channel that doesn’t broadcast locally anywhere.)

    [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstation#WGN,_WOR_and_other_emerging_superstations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstation#WGN,_WOR_and_other_emerging_superstations)

    Before cable companies as we know them, there was EDIT: CATV and satellite TV.

    CATV, “Community antenna TV,” operated like cable, but just with antennas. There’d be really big, really strong antennas outside of a town, and then cables running from the antennas to people’s homes. Some of the antennas just picked up over-the-air signal. Some picked up microwave signals using relays, for farther distances. This was the beginning of cable TV.

    There was also satellite. You could buy your own satellite dish and receive whatever was being retransmitted through space. Some of those were network feeds that were being sent to affiliates throughout the country, some were what would be a predecessor to cable — specific networks that only broadcasted through satellite (that you could access through a ‘descrambler’) — and some were other things. Cable TV operators eventually used satellite rather than microwave to get most of their signals. But I’m getting head of myself here.

    Ted Turner, in creating TBS, realized the value in reaching a national audience with a local broadcast signal, so he figured out how to get his signal up on a satellite. WGN followed shortly thereafter. People with satellites, and then eventually, people with cable, could get the signal.

    I’m pretty sure that TBS/WGN were free on satellite (Turner and Wrigley could just say to their advertisers that they were reaching a national audience). And since the signal was there and available, AND because there wasn’t a whole ton of cable networks yet (Springsteen’s “57 channels and nothing on” seems quaint today… My parents’ basic cable in the 80s had, I think, about 20 channels including local networks), it was a no-brainer for many cable companies to carry them. Then, when people were hooked on Cubs or Braves games, or reruns of Seinfeld or old movies they couldn’t find elsewhere, they became part of the standards cable lineup.

    The subsequent events are documented pretty well by other commenters. I don’t know what the licensing deals are these days, but I’m guessing that a surplus of channels has made the superstations less desirable for cable operators, and a more niche audience has lowered demand for much of their programming (especially WGN).